During the third Democratic debate Saturday night, Senator Bernie Sanders apologized to Hillary Clinton and her supporters for his campaign’s unauthorized access to her voter data this week. At the same time however, the DNC’s decision to attempt to hang Bernie Sanders with the mistake shows unequivocally that the party’s leadership is hostile toward Bernie Sanders, a fact that will likely come back to haunt them as Bernie Sanders continues to grow in popularity with the American people.

“It bothers me very much that rather than working on this issue to resolve it, it has become many press releases from the Clinton campaign later,” said Bernie Sanders.

According to the Sanders campaign, the breach of the data is equally the fault of the DNC for using broken software that could be breached and a campaign staffer who tried to access that data. Once news of the breach was known, the DNC responded by ending the Sanders campaign’s access to the data – a decision that Sanders has said was “arbitrary.”

“[T]he stakes are higher than the political fight between Bernie and Hillary,” wrote Josh Hendler in a blog post. “The DNC being seen as the fair arbiter and steward of the data is critical to this continued advantage over Republicans. If the DNC is no longer that trusted broker, we might see candidates using third party systems. This risks the Party’s access to valuable data collected by campaigns, especially during a Presidential.”

Bernie Sanders doesn’t need to apologize to the Hillary campaign, the DNC needs to apologize to Democrats for its mistreatment of the candidates.